Dr Diana Barnes (Postdoctoral Research Fellow)

PhD (Melbourne)

Diana Barnes took up a University of Queensland Postdoctoral Fellowship in October 2013 jointly sponsored by EMSAH, CHED and the UQ node of the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of the Emotions. Prior to that, as the inaugural recipient of the University of Melbourne S. Ernest Sprott Travelling Fellowship (2012-13), she was a visiting fellow in the English Department at Columbia University, New York.

Diana is a literary scholar with research interests in gender, cultural politics and intellectual history. She has a completed book on early modern print letters and ideas of political community. She is currently completing a collaborative ARC Discovery project on the history of women’s letter writing, for which she is co-writing a history of women’s letters. Her new research project, entitled “The Politic of Civility: Historicising Early Modern Genres of Community, 1580-1660” is a study of how a variety of literary and non-literary genres hosted a discussion concerning the political and philosophical nature of community that prefigured the radical debates that erupted during the English Civil War.

Books

Recent articles

“The Public Life of a Woman of Wit and Quality: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and the Vogue for Smallpox Inoculation,” Feminist Studies 38.2 (2012): 330-62.“

Philosophy in Familiar Epistolary Form in Margaret Cavendish’s Philosophical Letters (1664)” in special issue “Friendship in Early Modern Philosophy and Science” ed. Richard Yeo and Vanessa Smith, Parergon, 26.2 (2009): 39-64.“

Restoration of Royalist Form in Margaret Cavendish’s Sociable Letters (1664),” Meridian: The La Trobe University English Review, 8.1 (2001): 201-14.